Listening To Grasshoppers: Field Notes On Democracy

Arundhati Roy

Jul 2009 · Penguin Canada

About this ebook

From the 2002 genocide against Muslims in Gujarat to the attacks on Mumbai in November 2008, this extraordinary series of linked essays bravely tracks the faultlines that threaten to destroy India's precarious democracy and send shockwaves through the region and beyond.

Daring to speak out against the lies of both state governments and murderous special interest groups, Arundhati Roy makes a powerful case for the relevance of articulate activism. If nothing is done, she argues, Muslim and Hindu extremists will continue to tear apart both each other and India's pluralist nation, bringing Pakistan and India ever closer to nuclear war, and making yet worse the undocumented plight of the half of India's citizens subsisting below the poverty line.

About the author

ARUNDHATI ROY is the author of The God of Small Things, which won the Booker Prize in 1997. Two volumes of her non-fiction writing, The Algebra of Infinite Justice and An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire, were published in 2001 and 2005 respectively. The Shape of the Beast, a collection of her interviews, was published in 2008. Arundhati Roy lives in New Delhi